This essay is the type of paper that will inform you on how the Boy Scouts of America is a Discourse Community. For this one, I had to use strategies for obtaining information that I had not used before. A good example was interviewing a person that is a prominent person within that discourse community. It is because of this assignment that I realized how effective interviews are, and how you can get plenty of information for your essay. Without a doubt, it is a strategy that I will be using for my future papers.
The Boy Scouts of America is an organization that teaches young men how to survive in the outdoors as well as survive in everyday life. The Boy Scouts are undoubtedly a discourse community (Swales 215) because they fit into the characteristics of a discourse community perfectly. John Swales laid out six characteristics of a discourse community, but it would take me a significant amount of time to write on all six of them within scouting. They have agreed upon a common set of public goals, they possess one or more genre, they have their own personalized lexis, and they have methods of intercommunication for their members. All of these characteristics describe the Boy Scouts, and they help to shape whom a young scout will become.
My old scoutmaster Patrick Murphy, who has been with the Boy Scouts since he was a scout himself, confirmed that the Boy Scouts’ public goal is “To develop better character in young men so they will succeed in life’s challenges” (Murphy). Anyone will be able to see this in all Boy Scout troops. For example, the Scout Oath tells scouts always to do their best, to keep themselves physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. Furthermore, the Scout Law says that a scout will be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, and reverent (US Scouting Service Project). If this doesn’t show someone that the Boy Scouts are committed to turning young scouts into men with character, then nothing will. Scouting will help you become ready to do anything, anywhere. I was a boy scout for seven years, and I can truthfully say that I learned more about how to live in the real world and the outdoors than any other place in my life. This fact should also be visible to the people outside of scouting because of the weekly meetings and the camping trips they take. During the weekly meetings, the older scouts would help the younger scouts with what is called scouting skills. These are skills that will help scouts on camping trips or help them with their progress toward their next rank. Camping trips are where the idea of helping young men become more familiar and learn how to navigate the outdoors begins to develop in their life. There are many different types of camping trips that a scout can take. Some trips take them out in the woods, or there are ones that have a specific purpose, for instance going to the Marine Corps Museum. On these camping trips, younger scouts will learn many things like how to set up their tent, how to cook food on an open fire, or how to orienteer. In my personal opinion, this is the best aspect of scouting because it gives scouts a chance to hang out with other guys their age. This allows scouts to be themselves and focus solely on themselves and gives them a chance to develop their own character. These things contribute to what my old scoutmaster had stated that scouting helps young men develop more character and it will help them to succeed in life no matter where they end up.
The Boy Scouts are able to achieve their common public goal by recruiting a lot of people of differing races, religions, ethnicities. Through this substantial recruiting campaign, a lot of different genres are required to be brought in to suit every scout’s wants or needs. This makes the scouting organization intricate and flexible. Victoria Marro, who was a student of Elizabeth Wardle at the University of Central Florida, wrote that “… the amount of genres used by a group is dependent on how complex and diverse the group is” (Marro 431). Comparatively, scouting is a complex system of thousands of troops and millions of people. The multiple genres in scouting can be seen mostly through the merit badge system. A merit badge is a badge that a scout gets for doing an amount of work in a workbook as well as any projects or prerequisites. These genres include sports, medicine, survival, aquatics, and education. Some specific examples of merit badges with different genres are the first aid merit badge which fits into the medicine genre or the swimming merit badge which fits into the aquatic genre. By completing and receiving a merit badge, a scout is taking a step toward the process of ranking up as well as broadening their mind to new ideas and hobbies. Moreover, to take it to another level there are other genres of merit badges in the sense that there are regular merit badges and then there are Eagle required merit badges. Regular merit badges are mostly optional, but Eagle required merit badges are merit badges that have a scout has to get in order to finally rank up to the highest rank in scouts, Eagle Scout. There are 12 of these Eagle required merit badges, and a few of them take up to 3 months to complete. A few examples of Eagle-required merit badges are first aid, swimming, personal finance, personal fitness, and many more. These merit badges have also helped to develop certain words that have helped to mold the existence of the Boy Scouts of America as we know it.
The Boy Scouts has created many lexeis over the 108 years its been in existence here in America. Some examples are Totin Chit, Tenderfoot, or Life Scout. Lexis has added to the individualism of the members that call themselves Boy Scouts. As just stated, there are terms like Tenderfoot, which is rank, but there are also JASMs (Junior Assistant Scoutmaster) or an SPL (Senior Patrol Leader). These sorts of examples define how much power someone can hold over someone else. This is important to the quality of life within the troop and to keep people from going crazy and assuming control because they want to. These lexeis hold much power for just being words. I personally experienced this during my time in Boy Scouts because I was Patrol Leader and ASPL (Assistant Senior Patrol Leader). There was one time that I was at a meeting, and there was a kid that would not listen to anyone else in his patrol. I had to come in, and as ASPL it was my responsibility to go to the kid and tell him that he needed to calm down and listen to his patrol leader. As soon as I told him that he needed to calm down, he immediately did and sat down. These lexeis have a significant effect on how the people of troops communicate, but there is a broader communication system in place for the members of any troop.
Communication within scouting is essential because it provides scouts and parents with information that they will need. Most of the time that communication will come in the form of emails, texts, or word of mouth at meetings. In the interview, Mr. Murphy told me that there is a newer program that his troop has started using called Scoutbook (Murphy). This program allows a leader of the troop to send out emails and allows the parents to keep track of the campouts their children are on (Scoutbook). This is beneficial to the upkeep of the scout troops because if the parents and the troop leaders were not to communicate, then the troop would fall apart. The parents of the children would not want to send their children to a scout troop that doesn’t want to communicate with them. Moreover, there is also a way for the people in charge of all of scouts in the country to get in touch with people. They also mostly use emails as well, but there is a magazine that the national leaders of Boy Scouts of America put out for the scouts. This magazine is named Boys Life, and it tells kids what is going on in the Boy Scouts organization nationally, and it also tells them stories about how other scouts all around the country are putting their training to the test. The magazine will tell you about other scouts that saved people from drowning or how they put their first aid experience to the test. This is also another vital form of communication within Boy Scouts because it tells the kids what is happening in their organization, how they can use their skills in the real world, and it makes it exciting for kids to read.
In a final analysis, the Boy Scouts of America organization clearly fits into the qualifications of a discourse community as laid out by Swales. The organization has a common public goal that has been agreed upon, it possesses more than one genre, its own set of lexis, and has methods for intercommunication for its members. The Boy Scouts had a significant influence on my life and who I am today. I experienced all of the amazing examples I talked about, and I was even lucky enough to achieve my Eagle Scout. Without a doubt, I would recommend all young boys to join Boy Scouts and become the best version of themselves. (Word Count 1625)
Help Received: Faculty Consultations, Peer Reviews, Writing Center.
Work Cited
“Boy Scout Oath, Law, Motto and Slogan and the Outdoor Code.” U.S. Scouting Service Project: BSA FAMOUS SCOUTS, 18 Nov. 2017, www.usscouts.org/advance/boyscout/bsoathlaw.asp.
Marro, Victoria. “The Genres of Chi Omega.” Writing About Writing, Ed. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, Boston: Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2017, pp. 426-437. Print.
Murphy, Patrick. Telephone interview, 10 Jul. 2018.
Scoutbook. Boy Scouts of America. 2015. https://www.scoutbook.com/
Swales, John. “The Concept of Discourse Community.” Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Boston: Cambridge UP, 1990. 21-32. Print.